Journalist: Cambodians Will Continue Search For Justice

International Tribunal Sought To Prosecute Khmer Rouge Leaders

April 17, 1998|By ROBERT D. McFADDEN The New York Times

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist whose ordeal of forced labor, starvation and beatings by the Khmer Rouge was portrayed in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, said Wednesday that Pol Pot's death may have dashed hopes to try him for crimes against humanity but would not end a quest for justice by survivors of his four-year reign of terror.

``This is sad for the Cambodian people because he was never held accountable for the deaths of 2 million of his fellow countryman,'' Dith said. But, he said, ``the Jewish people's search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler, and the Cambodian people's search for justice doesn't end with Pol Pot.''

Dith, 55, escaped from Cambodia in 1979 and has since been a photographer for The New York Times. He has lectured and campaigned for years to widen awareness of what happened in his homeland from 1975 to 1979, when cities were emptied at gunpoint, millions were enslaved in a grotesque agrarian utopia and executions and atrocities, particularly against the intelligentsia, were commonplace.

``I am hoping that the world will continue to help the Cambodian people bring Pol Pot's inner circle to trial,'' Dith said. ``President Clinton recently took a positive first step toward this goal, and I'm hoping the world will create an international tribunal to prosecute the surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders.''

Among those still sought for trial, he said, are Khieu Samphan, who was president of the communist state known as Kampuchea and in recent years has been the nominal leader of the Khmer Rouge, and Ieng Sary, who was Pol Pot's foreign minister and brother-in-law.

In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and the United States withdrew its forces, Dith was a translator and aide to Sydney Schanberg, a correspondent for The Times. Dith's wife and four children managed to get out of the country, but he and Schanberg stayed on to cover the story of Cambodia's fall. Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

Forced by the Khmer Rouge from refuge in the French Embassy in the capital of Phnom Penh, Dith joined hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who streamed into the countryside. Over the next four years he labored 16 hours a day in farm camps, lived in the open, subsisted on a starvation diet and was subjected to relentless humiliations, beatings and ``re-education'' programs.

He often saw people taken to killing fields and shot. Children, elderly people, members of religious or ethnic groups, all who had an education or even were suspected of being educated, were executed, he said.

As Vietnamese communist forces invaded Cambodia and drove Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge into the jungles, Dith escaped from his captors during the turmoil. At Siem Reap, where he had grown up, he learned that his father, two brothers, a sister and other relatives were dead. In October 1979 he fled into Thailand and later came to the United States.

On Thursday, recalling his experiences, he spoke of his hope for justice for the survivors of the Pol Pot era. ``Our wounds can never be healed, and we will never forget what the Khmer Rouge leaders did to the Cambodian people during their reign of terror.''